Tag Archives: Trauma Repetition

The effects of trauma, in the absence of effective therapy, can adversely affect our lives for years or even decades (for our WHOLE lifetimes, in fact) after it is over (indeed, the effects of trauma themselves can take years from when the traumatic experience ended to present themselves – in relation to this, you may wish to read my previously published article entitled : ‘Why Can Effects Of Childhood Trauma Be Delayed?’).

In his book, ‘The Betrayal Bond‘, Patrick Carnes, PhD, outlines eight main ways in which the experience of severe trauma can continue to affect us. I list these below :

Trauma reaction :

The ‘alarm’ response to the traumatic experience. These responses can be both biological and psychological. Extreme and prolonged trauma can lead to an individual becoming essentially ‘trapped’ in the alarm response which results in him/her becoming extremely, emotionally reactive and prone to flying into rages in response to the smallest of provocations. This state is sometimes referred to as hypervigilance or hyperarousal.

This refers to deriving pleasure from taking large risks, sensation seeking, and exposing oneself to high levels of danger or even from getting involved in violent situations ; individuals who are traumatized may behave in such ways to detract from feelings of emptiness and emotional pain.

Individuals displaying trauma arousal may :

find it difficult being alone

be intolerant of ‘low-stress situations’ (as such situations do not satisfy their cravings for mental stimulation).

need ever increasing ‘hits’ of stimulation and excitement due to habituation, leading to taking greater and greater risks

use stimulant drugs (e.g. cocaine)

associate with dangerous people

become increasingly addicted to the arousal state

Trauma blocking :

Trauma blocking refers to the individual’s attempts to numb him/herself so as to escape / block out painful feelings associated with the traumatic experiences.

This refers to the unconscious process of avoiding the reality of the traumatic experience by ‘splitting it off’ from conscious awareness so that it is compartmentalized and unintegrated into personality so as to allow day-to-day functioning (if it was not ‘split off’ and compartmentalized, it would psychologically overwhelm the individual. Therefore ‘splitting’ can be categorized as defence mechanism ; however, such splitting prevents the information associated with the traumatic experience being properly processed which, in turn, prevents traumatic resolution. (For more about ‘splitting’, click here).

‘Splitting’ can manifest itself in various ways :

using hallucinogenic drugs (such as LSD) to ‘enter an alternative reality.’

In extreme cases, ‘splitting’ can take on the form of dissociative identity disorder (which used to be called ‘multiple personality disorder’) which may involve amnesia about what one has been doing and where one is

According to Carnes, self-deprivation may relate to the individual having been deprived and neglected during childhood, causing him/her to believe, as an adult, that s/he is unworthy and undeserving of ‘the good things in life.’ If such an individual also has a high level of arousal caused by childhood trauma such as severe abuse (click here to read my article about hyperarousal ), this may also have led neurochemical changes in the individual’s brain making him/her prone to addictive behavior. When these two two factors (i.e. self-neglect caused by a belief of being ‘unworthy’ and proneness to addiction) coalesce, s/he may become, as it were, addicted to self-deprivation.

Carnes provides the example of anorexia, explaining that self-starvation operates like an addiction to drugs because it can increase the production of endorphins, the body’s natural pain-killers (e.g. Tepper, 1992). He also states that such addictions to deprivation may operate to psychologically compensate for a sense of loss of control in other areas of life ; the example Carnes provides is that of a woman who is sexually out of control ‘compensating’ by becoming anorexic.

Food is just one example of what such individuals may deprive themselves of, other examples include :

putting up with being treated badly by others (e.g. in belief of deserving bad treatment or in belief that ‘nice’, ‘decent’ people would not ‘lower themselves’ to be friends with one / have a relationship with one).

This refers to an unconscious drive to recreate and re-experience the trauma through people (e.g. forming relationships with physically abusive partners if one was physically abused as a child) and situations and to repeat behaviors associated with the original trauma.

Trauma repetition may also involve the traumatized individual being unconsciously driven to treat others in the same abusive manner that they themselves had been treated.

There exist different theories as to why individuals often re-enact their original traumatic experiences later on in life. For example, Levy PhD (1998) proposed that reenactments might be caused by :

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